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Dead on stuff from billmon.org:

Identity Politics

Imagine what people would say if a lefty goy American blogger like me wrote stuff like this:

Two very smart — and very Jewish — professionals . . . summed the night thusly: So we traded Lieberman for Cynthia McKinney?

Lamont, people say now, will not be an advocate for Israel the way Lieberman was — but he will not be hostile, or join the ranks of Israel bashers. Maybe trading him for McKinney was actually a good thing.

Why, what a filthy, anti-Semitic thing to say! How did Holy Joe put it? Oh yeah: Such bigotry just has no place in American public life.

But those paragraphs are not mine, you see. They were written by an Israeli Jewish correspondent for Ha’aretz, an Israeli Jewish newspaper. So they’re actually just clever, inside-baseball bits of commentary designed to show the folks back home what the American Jewish community thinks about Holy Joe’s fall from grace.

Actually, most of the Jews the Ha’arertz guy talked to didn’t seem all that broken up about it: “One could not detect a sense of anxiety over Lieberman’s political future — neither among Jewish activists, nor among pro-Israel advocates.” And why should they be? Like the man said, from a pro-Israel point of view, it wasn’t such a bad trade.

It’s always been a standard feature of what the neocons used to call (with a sneer) identity politics that the “brothers” can say things about each other that the Man doesn’t dare repeat — not without exposing his honky racist self. And here we have a prime example, although with considerable upward mobility.

What depresses me most about the constant playing and replaying of the anti-Semitism card isn’t the fact that I’m currently a target of it — Billmon is just an bunch of electrons, a shadow of the blogosphere, and it doesn’t matter what the pro-Israel partisans say about him — but the blanket of dishonesty and fear it throws over any discussion of Israel and Israel’s special relationship with the United States.

I mean, here we have an incredibly powerful lobby — as effective in its own sphere of interest as the NRA is with firearms, if not more so — and yet when a critic of Israel (or even worse, a goy critic of Israel) dares to mentions that power and influence it’s treated as the moral equivalent of a Julius Streicher editorial. The other day one of my e-mail stalkers accused me of writing stuff that could have appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter.

Now why would I want to do that when Fox News already has that market locked up?

On the other hand, when a Jewish writer for the New Yorker quoted AIPAC’s top lobbyist saying this:

“You see this napkin? In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”

I didn’t hear an upwelling of outrage in Right Blogistan — or a peep out of the Zionist sentinels at the Weekly Standard and The New Republic.

I wonder: What would the reaction have been if the writer’s last name had been Mearsheimer or Walt?

I’m not whining about the unfairness of it all: I’m old enough to know that all is fair in love, war and “transactional lobbying.” But I do see it as yet another example of the increasingly impermeable bubble that America now lives in — a kind of virtual reality in which the government, both political parties and the major media tacitly agree to ignore threatening facts or uncomfortable contradictions if recognizing them would upset the “mainstream” consensus. And America’s alliance with Israel is a cherished part of that consensus.

In this particular case, the make-believe reality is that there’s nothing unusual about the enormous influence that the representatives of a tiny Middle Eastern country (one without oil, no less) now have on Capitol Hill, and the assumption that anyone who thinks it is unusual and frequently harmful must hate the Jews — or at best is a “subliminal” anti-Semite, blissfully unaware that their prejudices are leading their policy positions around by the nose.

This mindset can generate some textbook cases of double think. The Washington Post Magazine, for example, recently ran a long article by its former Jerusalem correspondent, Glenn Frankel, which spent paragraph after paragraph describing the Israel lobby’s power and influence — and then smeared professors Mearsheimer and Walt as borderline anti-Semites for criticizing the power and influence of the Israel lobby.

Frankel even quoted Walt on this strange disconnect — “In effect, the Lobby boasts of its own power and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it” — and then promptly proceeded to prove his point for him:

Listening to Walt, you get the sense that he believes there is one correct and objective foreign policy that an enlightened elite would be able to agree upon if only those grubby ethnic interest groups were not out there playing politics.

For “enlightened elite,” read arrogant WASPs. For “grubby ethnic interest groups,” read the Jews. They don’t make innuendos any clearer than that. Of course, neither of the terms I’ve quoted appear in Walt and Meirsheimer’s infamous essay, but they allow Frankel to make the point he wanted to make — no doubt subliminally.

And so it goes — identity politics on steroids, with Ivy Tower academics and lefty bloggers cast in the role of the Czar’s Cossacks or a mob of Polish peasants stoned on vodka and out to make the “Christkillers” pay for their sins. (Mel, on the other hand, gets off with a light verbal slap. Politics, after all, makes for strange bedfellows, and pro-Israel politics makes for stranger than most these days.)

In the context of U.S. policy towards Israel and the Middle East, the object of playing the anti-Semitism card is to create a debate in which one side is constantly questioning its own motives. It demands that everyone accept the basic premise that criticism of Israel, the country, must equal hostility towards Jews, the ethnic group.

It’s ironic that this is precisely the same sleight of hand that neocon intellectuals like William Kristol and Norman Podhoretz accused liberals of using in the ’60s and ’70s — i.e. if you don’t support affirmative action you must be some kind of ignorant racist cracker. But then politics is full of such ironies, which is how we ended up with Republicans who sound like Bull Connor and Democrats who look like Henry Cabot Lodge.

But the Israel lobby has been far more successful at this game than Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton could ever dream. Questioning the moral justice of the original Zionist project has long since been ruled out of bounds. Defending the rights of the Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from their homes inside Israel proper is also a big no no. Demanding a two-state solution based on a return to Israel’s 1967 borders hasn’t quite been made into a thought crime yet, but it’s getting there, and if professors Dershowitz and Feldman have their way, simply asserting that not all Palestinian and Lebanese civilians are terrorists will soon be added to the list of positions tantamount to anti-Semitism. Just arguing that Arabs are human beings already draws the same response at Little Green Footballs.

The thing is, when a charge like anti-Semitism is repeated, over and over, high and low, to cover everything from David Duke’s poisonous rants [cheap shot – Duke says exactly the same thing billmon does] to the mildest criticisms of the Israeli war machine in action, it inevitably starts to lose its sting. If you’ve got any intellectual courage at all, you begin to think: I’m going to be accused of anti-Semitism no matter what I write, so why not write honestly, and let the readers decide who’s telling the truth?

I mean, why should the correspondent from Ha’aretz get to have all the fun?

http://billmon.org/